Chapter 1: Mastering a Foreign Language as a Psycholinguistic Problem

First, obviously, it is necessary to remind how the foreign (second after the native) language is taught in a regular non-specialized school or - which is almost the same in a non-specialized faculty at the university. The result is well known: as a result, no one masters a foreign language, although a lot of study time is spent on this matter. Any student can calculate exactly how much - in years, months, weeks or hours. The process itself consists mainly in mastering the rules of reading (most often it is called “the basics of pronunciation”, but ...), in learning foreign words, in learning the grammatical rules (and exceptions from them), and usually in the form of translations from foreign and native. If we compare this process with the process of mastering a native language, then it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to find common ways in them. We dare to assert that any language cannot be reduced to its descriptions in textbooks; You can perfectly memorize many thousands of foreign words and perfectly master both the grammar and the rules of pronunciation - as a result, the language will not become an active student asset.

Consequently, beyond the language description in textbooks and beyond the training built on these descriptions, “something” remains. Very important, on which the desired, but rarely achievable success depends. Let's try to figure out what's wrong.

The first thing that catches the eye is the lack of a sufficiently strong motivation to speak in a new language in an ordinary student. This subject, to put it simply, does not constitute such a life goal, for which the average student is ready to fulfill all the recommendations of the trainer, to perfectly perform all the exercises in the textbook, etc. That's if the life goal (for example, career considerations, the choice of the main specialty, etc.) will be directly related to the need to own a second language, then the ultimate success can be achieved. We say “maybe”, because a lot depends on the method of instruction, on the intensity of classes, on the linguistic abilities of the student and, in particular, on his age.

Further, it is necessary to understand all the same in the structural-psychological essence of language as an academic subject: one thing, if a language is understood as a sign system in statics - then, indeed, it is enough to learn a dictionary, a phonological system and grammar. But the school and university subject matter - as it was conceived by the authors of programs and textbooks - the second language should appear as a dynamic system that functions in speech, as an activity, and practical activities in the second language cannot be learned through the description of words and grammatical rules.

Unlike other subject knowledge (history, geography, chemistry) speech activity is a complex of skills and abilities - speaking and reading, writing, understanding oral speech by listening (listening). Historical material can be understood, assimilated and well retell, even verbally, even in written form. The essence of the skills and skills of a foreign language-speech type lies precisely in the ability to speak (write), while operating with completely different (relative to native) units of speech. It does not matter in which subject area they appear, what specific content they construct - geographical, botanical or historical; it is important that the units of language (speech) themselves are other. And since any language was created by many centuries and the efforts of many thousands of people, the most important thing in the structure of a given language is a specific tradition, not logic. It is impossible to answer the question why, in one language, “so” and in the other, “that way”. One can only say: this is the custom.

Examples In Russian, the preposition "on" is used to denote the spatial distribution of something like

horizontal plane (on the table), and on the vertical (on the wall). A similar preposition of the English language “on” is used in these cases as well. But in German, the preposition “auf” is used for the horizontal plane, and “an” for the vertical one. What does this practically mean for the learner? First, it means a serious difficulty, an additional load on the memory and the need for numerous exercises in the use of a preposition (and not only this, but all others; and not only pretexts ...). Secondly, it means the inevitability of numerous and persistent mistakes in one’s own speech.

By the way, such errors caused by the transfer of systemic phenomena of one's own language to speech in the language being studied are collectively called interference (“mixing”, “imposing”). But it is well known that frequent failures in some business discourage him. Therefore, psychologically competently constructing a learning process means, in particular, the need for prevention, neutralizing mistakes. How to do it, later.

More examples. In Russian and German, combinations with the meaning “put on the hat” and “take off the hat” are different in sound and spelling. And in English, the same verb “to hat” means both, depending on the context. Why? So accepted. This specificity constitutes the main difficulty "in mastering a second language (and not at all grammar and the need to learn words: words and grammar rules and exceptions from them of course). This specificity is in the peculiarities of the compatibility of lexical units with each other, because the so-called" equivalent vocabulary ”, i.e., semantically identical, is in fact equivalent in only a small number of cases.

Last example. The adjective “cool” in our native language can be combined, for example, with the nouns “egg”, “boiling water”, “slope”, “forehead”, “temper”. In German and other languages, in all these cases, different adjectives are needed.

Unfortunately, for one language there are still no detailed descriptions of word usage, which could at least come close to the necessary completeness for anyone learning a language as a second. There is one reason - the enormous amount of work that

the future will be able to execute only a special computer program of huge capacity.

For the reasons stated, the method of mastering a second language should be fundamentally different than the one that is in use almost everywhere.

But first of all, the story of an effective methodology will consider a phenomenon that may seem far from our topic.

The phenomenon is cases of aphasia in polyglots. Here is a simple case - aphasia in bilingual, which lost its native language, but retained the second. Generally speaking, the “Vald's rule” exists in aphasiology. The scientist Ignacy Vald discovered that during aphasia, the first language of the polyglots recovers just their native language, and behind it those that are best and longest kept in memory - the second, third, fourth ... There are also paradoxical exceptions. What is important here for us is the essence, and not the order of recovering languages.

The essence lies in the fact that in the brain apparatus, its verbal memory autonomously coexist systems of different languages ​​that do not interfere, do not interfere with one another. It was this fact that the modest foreign language teacher of one of the Kiev gymnasiums L. Leshe drew attention to at the end of the 19th century. And he concluded: it is necessary to build a teaching methodology in such a way that from the very beginning of training and up to the very end of it, the second language “contacts” as little as possible with the system of the native in the student's psyche. Therefore, L. Leshe spoke out against the traditional grammar-translational method in favor of the other, called abroad “direct”, and in Russia - “natural”. Both names are motivated by the fact that within the framework of the new methodology, the native language should not be an “intermediary” (hence the “direct”), and the whole learning process should fundamentally come closer to the method of “natural” (hence the “natural”) mastery of the native language.

Without going into details here, we note that the best modern methods, called "audiovisual" or "communicative", have absorbed all the best from the "direct" or "natural" method. This is the best - in a predominantly monolingual (in the second language) way of building lessons. The native language is “banished” here, as far as is generally possible, translation exercises are relegated to

moved training stage, where you can already talk about some degree of fluency in a second language.

How can the student explain the meaning of foreign language statements? This is done with the help of specially developed means of clarity, the meaning of the spoken is illustrated every time through the demonstration of the relevant pictures or real objects. In this case, the presenter says in the target language (and the trainees repeat it): “This is a cat, this is a dog, this is a cow, this is an elephant”, watching carefully for the change of pictures and pronunciation. If you constantly change the displayed pictures, without changing their content essentially (that is, showing not the same “elephant”, but different ones), without changing the type of construction, then in the minds of the students and in their memory it is effectively delayed, firstly, in foreign language the word, and, secondly, the repeated construction (its structure), the first part of which does not change in this lesson. Intuitively, students learn the meaning of both the statements in general and the meaning of the unchanged part (with the second variable).

We note that learning from the very beginning deals not with isolated words, but with holistic statements, which, when consolidating and repeating material, can immediately be applied in one's own speech (without painful recall of the design rules). If in one lesson we introduce, say, 10 new lexical units in one syntactic structure, then it is easy to calculate how long you can master, say, a thousand lexical units in 100 structures - for one hundred lessons.

Theoretically, in 500 classes, you can master five hundred constructions (and the English linguist counted and described these constructions, considering them sufficient for good command of the English language) and 5,000 lexical items. By the way, this amount of vocabulary is enough for everyday communication in a second language. Practically, this requires not 500 hours, but 800 hours (to ensure intensive repetitive exercises). But 300 hours from them today, as a rule, are used for independent work of students, at the disposal of which special training videos are announced (therefore the method is called “audiovisual”). If classes are held often enough (for example, 4 hours a day), then the specified result will be achieved on average for the full

years (with daily homework of two hours in addition to classroom work).

Naturally, in the absence of practice after this (necessarily abundant reading and retelling of texts, listening to foreign language speech), the achievements gained will progressively disappear. Therefore, all specialists are unanimous in their opinion that the “one-time learning” of a second language is doomed to failure, that constant practice in speaking on it is necessary to maintain skills at a good level. It is worth noting that in a foreign language environment, people who do not regularly use their native language gradually forget it; after 5-10 years of this state of affairs, the native language will have to be strenuously restored by special exercises.

Let us turn to the real story of one life, already described in the scientific literature. This story will be interesting to us in its final part, which speaks about the importance of knowledge of psycholinguistic patterns.

In 1945, an eleven-year-old German boy found himself in tragic conditions. He lost his relatives, who lived with him in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) and could not, despite repeated attempts, return to Germany. He wandered around the territory of Lithuania, Belarus without any documents, he was detained and placed in any kind of children's correctional facilities, no one believed him that he was German (although he did not speak a word of Russian at first). For constant escapes and vagrancy, and then on false accusations of all kinds of thefts, with other people's documents, also frequently replaced, Dan was finally in far concentration camps. Sentenced to lengthy terms of imprisonment, he did not abandon his attempts to escape, for which he received more and more new sentences. In total, he spent in the institutions of the Gulag and in the references for more than 40 years, after which he became a classic "homeless" and settled in Moscow. Having completely forgotten his native German language, he did not lose hope of returning to his homeland. But no one gave him a visa to Germany: he could not prove his national identity, and according to previous documents he was Russian.

Quite by chance, a reporter from a well-known newspaper turned his attention to a trumpeter who played for a living in an underground passage on Pushkin Square. He played very well, and the journalist himself once performed in a jazz orchestra and

could well appreciate the quality of the game trumpeter. He agreed to tell the journalist his life story, explaining that he was a little able to play the trumpet as a child, and then he learned to play well in the orchestra of prisoners who were led by a long-term musician with a famous name. Everything that the German told (and the newspaper man immediately believed that the trumpeter was not deceiving) prompted the correspondent to turn to specialists for help. The question was this: either it will be possible to somehow prove that the trumpeter was really born and spent part of his childhood in Germany (and then he can get a visa and go home), or he is destined to end the life of a homeless person. Do not forget that in 1989, when the first meeting of a journalist with a German trumpeter took place, he was already 56 years old.

The question is, how was it possible to prove the national-cultural identity of a person without documents, speaking only Russian? Pay attention not only to the word "national", but also to the word "cultural." Practically, this means that it is necessary to find out whether the subject (the trumpeter has become a subject of special expertise) owns that knowledge of the specific cultural realities of Germany, by which one can determine that he is telling the truth about himself. “Realities” are material and cultural facts, everyday details, characteristic only for a given national community. It is important to note that for decades our subject did not come into contact with these realities, but the memory of his childhood was to preserve them.

The expert counted on it. He specially prepared for presentation to the subject such a number of subjects as postage stamps of Germany of the 30s-40s (assuming that the trumpeter collected stamps in childhood), postcards with views of German cities, a German songwriter from his childhood, an atlas of Germany at that time, special cardboard coasters for beer mugs (made only in Germany), special household appliances - one to pierce eggs before cooking (so that the egg does not crack), the other - to catch drops from the spout of the teapot or coffee pot ( so that the drops do not stain the fresh tablecloth). Note that the representative of Russian or other (non-German) culture, all these realities are unknown.

The experience of the expert was not only a complete success (i.e., the subject immediately recognized "his" and very emotional

explained the functions, device and properties of objects and images), but revealed another important fact: the subject named a number of subjects presented to him in his native language. He examined the songwriter, read the notes, restored the motives of the once familiar songs, and the melody “pulled out” the German-speaking texts.

We pass a number of the most interesting details of the experience and summarize its psycholinguistic results. First, the figurative and object memory is stronger than the linguistic one. Second: in the state of the strongest positive stress, vivid figurative memory can restore the previous connections between the idea of ​​specific objects and their designation in the language in which these objects were originally designated, that is, in their native language. Third: the experience described testifies to the scientific validity of the “direct” (“natural”) method of learning a second language. In addition, of course, it is impossible not to recall the reality of the theory of thinking in the CPC system (according to N. I. Zhinkin).

... Our test subject received a visa, visited Germany, but it was too late to restore his native language in full at his age. No one was waiting for him at home. He returned to Russia.